She was always so careful around me.
It’s like the old folktales, you see. Names have power. It was what we told the children back in the village– be wary of giving strangers your name, lest they be a fey in disguise. Your name is what they call the deepest parts of you, the flickering sparks of the life in your chest. Never, ever give that out for free.
I knew that, once. I remember those days well enough, though the edges of each scene twist and blur in the way of old memories. How old was I, that day in the forest? Seventeen? Twenty? Old enough to think I was clever, but too young to know I could never be clever enough.
I’d made the journey to the ring of mushrooms, speckled, crimson things like little sentries on duty. I remember how my heart burned in my chest– was it only the effort that made it ache so? Or was it the desperation, more than the exertion, that drove all reason from my mind and the nameless portions of my soul?
I had stood there, outside the ring. Even then I had heard the magic humming in the air and the leaves and the birdsong, weaving a tune of ancient things.
I could go back, whispered the last bastion of sense in my spirit. I could find another way.
But no. The healers had all given up, and none of us knew where to get the money for those lofty physicians from the city proper. My love grew weaker by the hour, and I could not bear to watch him suffer.
So, to the fairy ring I went.
When she appeared to me it was with a smile, but I would come to know the cruel tilt of her head that meant that she was irate. That was the way of the fey folk– never would they be so foolish as to outright scorn you, for cruelty that blatant can be measured and judged. It was all sharp teeth in crooked smiles, a questioning glance here and a dagger’s edge in a voice there. They were careful things, the fey, always looking for weapons to use against you, hiding the ones you might turn against them.
“Little she-wolf,” she had said, regarding me with eyes of opal and tourmaline, “why do you come to my ring?”
She drew my name out of me carefully, so slowly that in my fire I did not realize what was happening until it was too late. I had never been particularly attached to my name before– it was a simple thing, in my village, well-used and serviceable. I had never heard it said the way she did that day; each syllable sounded foreign on her tongue, a thorny bramble that would draw blood if she was not careful. It meant so little until the moment when it was no longer mine. Then it was everything.
A part of me withered that day in the woods. But my fate was decided.
I will not bore you with tales of the following years– the fey are cruel creatures by nature, closer to beast than man, and a wayward human offers endless amusement. I will not linger on the magic that some days hummed and sang so loudly I thought it would consume me, flowing through my fingers like river water; I will not wax too poetic about the way everything shimmered, like the mirages that the travellers would tell me they saw in the desert.
But of my mistress– for that is what she bade me call her, and I could not refuse even though the word burned on my tongue– I will say this. Do not make the mistake that many others have. There was no friendship there, no thorny bud of respect that blossomed into understanding. The fey are not like us, and they care little for beings that grow old and die in a flutter of gossamer wings. She was not my friend, and I would just as soon slit her throat if the magic that held me there would permit me to pick up a blade.
She never despised me, I think. Fey do not feel strong emotions like we do, that all-consuming fire that crackles and burns until we must act on it or perish. Fey are ice and stone, as unchanging as a glacier over a single day. They are moved only by the work of centuries, and I was too fleeting a creature for that. But make no mistake. Indifference, for a fey, is the most dangerous thing they can feel for mortal folk. She cared not whether I lived or died, whether I starved or grew ill. Only that I obeyed. They need not have been her orders– she had plenty of friends to entertain, after all. And what better way to do that than to show off her newest pet?
She never despised me, not really. And it was that blooming indifference that proved to be my salvation.
She grew careless, you see. When one particular fey darkened her doorway–tall, black-shadowed, shedding leaves like raven’s feathers– she would order me away, bid me clean some dust-cloaked corner or mind the other creatures that slumbered in her menagerie. With that hateful magic stirring within me, even as I spit curses and spiteful threats, I would be forced to obey. I would see their silhouettes in the blue-prism glass of the windows, or in the shapes thrown long across the shadowy walls; fragmented shards, dark and light, a shining and a shattering. Sometimes I would catch phrases in their language, but never a full sentence. Never enough to learn the true nature of their quarrel. Years it went on this way, as in my heart I cursed her for her caution.
Until the day I heard her name.
She had forgotten I was there, when he arrived, and I was too old now to count myself among the foolish. I had hidden myself in what passed for a cupboard in that place, hoping that the magic humming and thrumming in my ears would not give me away. He arrived, they fought. Wings fluttered, feathers whirled in the air. Pointed ears drew back and sharp teeth glinted in the candlelight.
I knew when her true name had been spoken, the way it made all the magic go limp and heavy from the force of it. The way she stilled, tourmaline eyes glittering venomously. She spat words of daggers and slow deaths, but something in her had withered.
I might almost have felt pity. I had withered that long-ago day, and now she knew what it was to have a part of yourself that you could not control. But when her name rolled off my tongue, all running water and autumn wind, and I felt my golden shackles loose, I could feel nothing but fire.
I will not bore you with that final fight, either. It was a bloody thing, and long. She was an ancient creature, and even weakened she was stronger in magic than the little she-wolf she had captured. But in the end, she bled more than I.
I could not go home. I tried to, first thing. But the village where I lived had been warped by age beyond my recognition, and all those who knew me that first day when I had left looked twice my age now, perhaps more. They reeled away from me like I was some strange thing, a ghost returned from the grave to haunt them. Perhaps I was. I certainly shed enough tears.
My love had not survived his illness. The fey do not care for us, after all. She cared not for the deal I had wished to make, only that I had been foolish enough to give her my name before all the words had left me. His family had buried him beneath a rowan tree, which grew tall and strong and protective. I could not approach it anymore, but it gave me comfort to know that at least in death he was beyond the reach of the fey.
For a time, I wandered. I could not stay anywhere for long; for every villager that was sympathetic to my tale, three more would decry me as a witch, a monster, some evil thing come to drag their children into the endless night. I was not like them anymore, they would say. Perhaps I had been human once, but my time with the fey had changed me. The magic still hummed in my heart, blooming at my command, and it did not matter how I tried to use it for good. They would come for me with torches and hateful words, spikes of rowan and wreaths of daisies that left scars on my skin that echoed the delicate curling of the leaves.
When I could bear it no longer, I retreated to the forest. It, at least, welcomed me; here I was at home among the nameless things, and the trees breathed a sigh of relief with every mushroom ring I burned. I built myself a cottage, part effort and part magic, and some days it creaked and rustled in ways that almost sounded like speech.
You might think this to be the end of my tale. I did too, for a time.
You see, not everyone stumbles into the clutches of the fey by choice. Many are foolish, or merely naive. Many are children, who cannot be blamed for the cruelty of things much older and more cunning than they. I found one such child by accident, a little boy, tears carving clean streaks down a dirty face. The fey that crept through the wood had come for him, and he was afraid.
I slew the beast that hunted him, gave him a place to sleep. I had intended to send him back to his village at dawn, but he had not wanted to go. He laughed at the leaves budding in my hair and stared with wide-eyed wonder at the pot stirring itself over the hearth, and in time his pleas cooled the fires of my stubbornness.
My son told me of others he had seen– desperate youths crying to the fey for help, as I had. Infants snatched from their cradles by knotted-bark hands. We searched together for these hapless, helpless souls, until the fey knew me by sight and they did not dare trouble the villages I protected.
My cottage grew, too. It had been enough for just the two of us, but not every person taken had had somewhere to return to. I magicked my little dwelling large enough to take in them all, and I learned to make sure that pot over the fire was never quite empty.
It has been a long time since my mistress drew her final icy breath. I have grown old, though something in the magic that burns inside me does not permit me to look it. It has been a long time, but I will never forget the feeling of the shackles around my neck and my heart. And so I will tell you, traveller, the things I tell the children that play by my hearth and the merchants that pass through my wood. Be mindful of the fey; no matter how brightly they smile, do not mistake politeness for goodness.
And never give them your name.
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